The National Wrestling Coaches Association (NWCA) has filed a lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Education challenging the proportionality prong of Title IX.

The lawsuit, filed in U.S. district court in Washington, D.C., last month, blames a 1996 rule, which clarifies the 1972 federal statute, with prompting colleges and universities to discriminate against men's teams.

Title IX prohibits sex discrimination in education by institutions that receive federal funding. Federal regulations say that schools can comply with Title IX in athletics by: providing participation opportunities for women and men that are substantially proportionate to their respective rates of enrollment as full-time undergraduates; or demonstrating a history and continuing practice of program expansion for the underrepresented gender; or fully and effectively accommodating the interests and abilities of the underrepresented gender.

The first part of that test, known as the proportionality prong, has come under fire in recent years by those who say administrators favor that objective test to the detriment of men's sports programs.

Also at issue is part of the 1996 clarification that said actual student-athletes would be counted rather than simply the number of spots allotted to teams.

"Many universities feel the only way to avoid a sure lawsuit is to use this proportionality interpretation," said Mike Moyer, the NWCA's executive director. "We would like to see decisions made truly on accommodating the interests of the students."

The suit against the Education Department contends that these federal regulations, and the subsequent court decisions interpreting them, have led many universities to cut men's sports rather than adding women's sports to seek gender equity.

Prior lawsuits have been filed by student-athletes against individual schools to protect or to reinstate athletics programs that had been cut by institutions citing Title IX concerns. None of those previous suits have been successful, but this is the first time the government itself is being challenged over the three-pronged test, according to Larry Joseph, the lead attorney for the plaintiffs.

The plaintiffs contend that because no U.S. president or attorney general signed off on the department's Title IX regulations, those regulations have no force and are illegal.

"The department needs to bring its policy up to date," Joseph told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. "Most schools probably were discriminating in the 1970s and some schools probably still are discriminating against women today. The difference is that there are now schools treating students equally and some where it's tilted the other way, against men."

Marcia Greenberger, co-president of the National Women's Law Center, told the San Francisco Chronicle that the suit was off base and that it advanced arguments that had previously been rejected by courts in other lawsuits.

" 'If at first you don't succeed, try, try, try again' may be good advice for those practicing their sport, but it's a bad legal strategy," she said, noting that not only does the number of male college athletes still far exceed the number of female athletes participating in intercollegiate athletics, but resources for women's sports continue to lag behind men's at all levels of education.

The most recent NCAA participation study showed that 210,989 men participated in intercollegiate athletics, while 150,185 women participated.

Greenberger also noted that women make up more than half the student body at Division I institutions, but she said they still get "second-class treatment from most universities, receiving only 30 percent of athletics recruiting dollars and 33 percent of overall athletics budgets."

Greenberger also has suggested that the blame lies not with Title IX, as the suit argues, but with the institutions' decisions to place a priority on high-profile men's sports like basketball and football.

The Department of Education does not comment on pending litigation.